Books, Prints and Drawings: The Musaeum as a Centre of Visual Documentation

It should be noted that in Strada’s own descriptions of his Musaeum quoted at the beginning of the last chapter, contemporary works of art—paintings—are mentioned only twice and only in passing. Either they seem to have been of less importance to Strada than his medals, his antiquities, his books and his rare manuscripts, or they did not fit his perception of the preferences of the particular patrons addressed. In these descriptions he never refers to the prints and drawings in his collection, though from other sources we know that those in fact constituted a very substantial part of his holdings. Moreover they constituted the part which appears to have been of the greatest immediate practical use—many examples of this have been advanced in Part ii of this study—and which was most explicitly exploited in Strada’s own projects, such as the libri di disegni he prepared for his patrons and his projected publications. In view of the size and importance of his holdings an analysis of the available information is useful, not only for the light it throws on Strada’s preferences and procedures, but also for the history of the collecting of drawings in general. After his death his collection must have been one of the major sources tapped by the better documented collectors of the seventeenth century—apart from Rudolf ii one thinks of Paul von Praun, Lord Arundel, Cassiano dal Pozzo and so on. The list of ‘Pleasant canvases’ and other objects Strada offered to the Duke of Bavaria sometime in the 1570s includes a few works on paper which have not yet been mentioned in the preceding chapter. They are described as follows: